


Throw Your Arms Over Your Eyes and Greet This Brand New Day (The Doctor's Hope Remix)

by unfolded73



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Pete's World, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 02:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1064845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfolded73/pseuds/unfolded73
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Immediately after the events of "Journey's End," the new Doctor figures out the trajectory of his life with Rose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Throw Your Arms Over Your Eyes and Greet This Brand New Day (The Doctor's Hope Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [throw your arms over your eyes and greet this brand new day](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/31586) by biggrstaffbunch. 



> Written in 2009 for the LJ community chips_remixed Doctor/Rose fic remix challenge. I discovered recently that I often default to Ten II's POV, so I was excited to explore the ground covered in this story by biggrstaffbunch from the Doctor's perspective.

He watched her standing there on the beach and saying goodbye, long after the TARDIS had gone and left a deep impression in the sand where it had so briefly stood. Her lips moved, murmurs carried away on the wind, and then a gust blew in a different direction and for a moment he heard what she was saying.

_“I love you.”_

They weren’t for him, those words. Perhaps they never would be.

He wanted, with every fibre of his new, half-human being, to run. No spaceship, not even a car, and all he’d be able to do is dash down the beach. So in that moment, the one thing that stopped the Doctor from running away from the woman he loved most in the world, in _all_ worlds, was the fear of looking daft. But in that moment, the reason he stayed maybe didn’t matter much.

Heart hammering, palms sweating (and how unpleasant was that? He’d never had to deal with sweaty palms before in his life), he walked up behind Rose and wrapped his arms around her. Tried not to think about what he would do if she pushed him away.

She didn’t. She leaned against him and his heart swelled with relief. Salt water soaked into his trainers and his feet were freezing and he didn’t care, because her body was warm and pressed against the front of his. Her soft hair brushed his neck and the Doctor hoped.

___

 

She told him she hated the blue suit. 

He didn’t mind, really. He had chosen it during one of his lonely sojourns after Donna stood there on a cold Christmas night in her soiled wedding dress and told him no, you’re too sad and strange and genocidal to travel with, thank you very much. The brown suit – well, the memory of putting it on for the first time, of hoping that looking natty would win Rose over to his new regeneration for once and all, it was painful, and he’d as soon be rid of it. It was a short-lived idea, because of course he’d reverted to the brown when he went back to woo Martha aboard his timeship. He flinched at the idea that he’d basically used the same ploy on Martha as on Rose. And he’d wondered what had possibly given Martha the idea that he had romantic feelings for her. What a bloody ponce he’d been.

He tried on the black leather jacket as a lark really, but then he liked it. Liked all the black. It fit his mood most days, which was a black pit of despair with a dash of rebellion and overlaid with a veneer of false cheer that he knew was full of holes. He was a master of false cheer, but these human emotions made it so much harder. Sometimes it felt like he was keeping himself from exploding into a fountain of rage by the slimmest of margins.

Later, she dumped more clothes on his bed and an alias in his lap, in the form of a small plastic identification card with his picture on it. He wondered why the thought of her calling him John made his gorge rise.

The Doctor didn’t want to beg. He knew he would if he had to, would throw himself at her feet and beg her to give him a chance to love her. She threw up barriers faster than he could count them, a slightly panicky glint in her eye, as if she stopped moving, stopped _doing_ for a moment, she would collapse into a ball of grief and loss. He understood.

He did beg, in the end. Maybe not with the words “please” or “I need you” or “don’t leave me,” but it was begging all the same, the way he pulled her rigid body close, brushing kisses over her closed eyelids and whispering promises. She held him, and he clung on, exhausted, feeling like he’d won a battle. He knew he hadn’t won the war.

___

 

The Torchwood in Pete’s World owned an observatory in the country, and sometimes in those first few weeks, when he thought he couldn’t bear the sight of Rose retreating to her own bedroom and closing the door, he spent the night there, peering up at the stars. He would let himself in with his Torchwood ID (John Smith, Senior Scientific Advisor, it said, and as often as not the “Senior” portion of his title made him laugh – his colleagues didn’t know the half of it) and dismiss the lone employee who was working the observatory night shift.

The timeline of this world ran ahead of his native universe, and the stars going out had been a ripple forward in time from what Davros had almost done with the reality bomb. Defeating Davros caused the timeline to heal itself, all stars returned to their rightful places in the cosmos. It was a familiar landscape; differences in the governmental structure of Great Britain, the relative popularity of tea versus coffee, or the existence of Britney Spears were one thing, but the major features of the galaxy matched what he knew. Training the large telescope on the coordinates of Kasterborous and seeing nothing, the Doctor realized how much loneliness there was in the familiar. 

He became known as a notorious eccentric around his colleagues at Torchwood, most of whom knew nothing of his origins. Still, his charm won people over, and it wasn’t long before he was invited down to the pub after work.

When Rose, clothed in a dressing gown and a glare, opened the door for him at half past two in the morning, he fell over the threshold in an undignified heap at her feet. “Think ‘m drunk,” he slurred, hypothesizing that if the room would just stop spinning for a bit, he could stand up and speak to her face to face.

“Do you _think_?” Rose said as she helped him to his feet.

“You can’t fool me, you’re being sarcastic. I know what sarcasm sounds like, you know. I’m very clever.”

“Mmm-hmm. Let’s get you to bed.”

When they stumbled into his bedroom, the Doctor pitched over onto the bed and Rose fell with him, one arm trapped under his chest. “Do you think you’ll ever love me even a fraction of how much I love you?” he asked, his mouth pressed into his pillow.

The last thing he was aware of before sinking into sleep was Rose’s cool, dry lips against his temple. If she said anything, he never knew what it was.

___

 

He wanted her.

He’d been physically attracted to Rose before, but this was new, the immediacy and intensity of his body’s response when he focused on the curve of her hips or the swell of her breasts under her clothes. 

Alone in his bed, his fantasies played on the backs of his eyelids like a pornographic film, and he found his complete lack of control shameful. Not that it stopped him from taking care of himself in the privacy of his own room. It was a biological function, after all.

In the end, he just came out and told her. They were curled up on the sofa together, and Rose was asking him questions about being part-human, part-Time Lord. It seemed as good a time as any.

“I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about having sex with you. It’s rather embarrassing, really. I don’t seem to be able to control it.”

Rose flushed, but with a smile threatening to break out over her face. “I think that’s probably normal.”

The Doctor shook his head. “It’s disgusting and degenerate.” He met her eyes. She was sitting so close and she was so warm and soft and smelled so good, and he could feel her breath on his face. “Isn’t it?” he whispered.

“Maybe, but then I guess I’m disgusting and degenerate too.” Her confession made it feel a bit like the top of his head might float right off his body. “Doctor?”

“Yeah?”

“What the hell am I waiting for?”

He swallowed, his mouth suddenly parched. “Well … you’re grieving the loss of … of the other me, and the life you thought you were going to get back to, and, and it’s good not to, not to rush –”

“Doctor?”

“What?”

“Shut up.” Her mouth smashed clumsily against his, nose pressing into his cheek, and it was wonderful. The inside of Rose’s mouth tasted of her in a fundamental, basic way that he wasn’t sure he’d ever understood before, and he thought that maybe later, after they’d sated what was suddenly for both of them overwhelming desire, that he would spend an hour just tasting every corner of her mouth. 

He rolled her underneath him on the sofa, and it was cramped and awkward until he felt her thighs on either side of his own and then it was just intoxicating. “Can I say one thing?” he murmured against her lips. Her hands skated down over his back to his bum and she arched up into him. The Doctor saw stars explode behind his eyes. He knew she could feel how hard he was, pressed between her legs, and he flushed with a combination of trepidation and delight at how much she seemed to be enjoying it.

“One thing,” Rose gasped.

“I want you.”

“I know.” Her kisses were hungry. “Take me to bed.”

This time the whispered I-love-yous were his, and he drank them, drank in her ecstasy, like the starving man he had been. Their bare skin reflected the moonlight coming in through the window, giving the whole encounter a dream-like quality that he almost despised. He wanted it to be real, wanted no doubt that this night with her was _real_ and _them_ and the first of many.

Afterward, he collapsed on his back next to her, hearing Rose’s subsiding gasps and trying to catch his own breath, the sweat on his skin cooling as the ceiling fan circulated overheard. A part of him was cataloguing the pleasurable sensations of his body and the crash of a whole cocktail of hormones in his brain making him drowsy. Another part was aware of Rose next to him, and he turned his head to look at her, at the rise and fall of her breasts as her respiration slowed and the lazy, sated half-smile she wore. He reached out and stroked his fingers up and down her bare arm. With a long stretch, she rolled over to face him. She was still smiling.

“As soon as you’re ready to do that again, make sure you let me know,” he said.

Rose giggled, and the Doctor’s heart soared.

___

 

It wasn’t something he liked to admit to Rose, how much he struggled with the nature of his existence.

As if it weren’t enough to have a millennium of memories packed inside his head while his body seemed convinced that he was a teenager, as if it weren’t enough that he could _feel_ himself ageing, could feel his life slipping away with every beat of his single heart, he also had to contend with the fact that his creation had destroyed Donna’s mind.

There was no doubt what the other Doctor would have done to save her, but the fact that she was walking around somewhere in the other universe with no memory of her time on the TARDIS was almost as cruel as if she had died. He was glad he hadn’t been forced to see it, and it made him feel a rush of sympathy for his Time Lord counterpart. It was the same sympathy he sometimes felt for the other man when he lay in bed, still and quiet, and watched Rose sleeping.

He stepped into a church one day. Churches weren’t something he paid much mind to. He understood on an intellectual level why humans sought out religion, but it had no bearing on his life. He couldn’t even say, as people sometimes did, that he envied their faith.

Nonetheless, he stepped into a church.

He closed his eyes and let the music wash over him. Many of the most beautiful pieces of music created by the human race were done so as a form of worship, it was as true in this universe as the other. There was certainly something to be said for that, he thought.

There was so much in his existence that was wonderful. He loved the mundane aspects of living a life, day after day – taking a shower, making toast, driving a car, watching a film, making love ... sometimes he felt so much joy at these simple things that he wondered that he didn’t burst open from it. But there were things that he almost couldn’t bear. Sometimes the thought of waking up in the same bed day after day left him trembling in a cold sweat.

He looked at the people sitting around him, with either real or feigned interest in the service on their faces, or with their brows furrowed in worry about something in their lives outside the church doors. All of them wondering where in the world they fit in, wondering how they were going to be happy during their fleeting decades of life, perhaps even pondering the sequence of improbable events that had led to their conception and birth. They weren’t so different from him, the Doctor realised.

Standing up, he quietly edged out of his pew at the back and left the sanctuary. With a push against the heavy wooden door, the Doctor stepped out into the world. He thought about coffee and beans on toast and music and laughter and broken pipes and credit card bills and sex and love. It was a brand new day, and he was going home.


End file.
